A still from an American Energy Alliance ad. (Click to watch.)

Here's an astonishing statistic, brought to us by Bloomberg:

In April, 16,991 negative ads aired in various parts of the country and 13,748 of them -- or 81 percent -- focused on energy, according to data provided by New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, which tracks advertising.

Energy? Really?

The details of the story make clear that the vast bulk of these negative energy ads are attack ads directed at Obama, purchased by big PACs -- Americans for Prosperity, American Energy Alliance, Let Freedom Ring, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies -- awash in Big Oil money.

What the hell is going on? Why is energy dominating the right's campaign against Obama?

The future's getting hotter, and nobody chihuahua-nts that.

One more quick note on my exchange with climate scientist Jonathan Foley (poor guy never signed up to be my foil; that'll teach him to tweet).

In mulling over what counts as "alarmism," I mentioned the recent report from the International Energy Agency warning that, on our current trajectory, we're headed to 6 degrees C (~11 degrees F) global temperature rise by 2100. Given that 2 degrees C is generally accepted as the threshold of safety, 6 degrees C sounds pretty alarming!

Foley -- who's worked with models for years -- said that 6 degrees C is "implausible" and that most climate scientists he knows don't take it seriously. Why? Because it assumes business-as-usual out to 2100; that is to say, it projects no major changes in our energy system. That seems unlikely.

How much will the world mobilize to transform its energy systems? Let's pause for a moment and consider what sort of question that is. It's not about climate sensitivity or forcings or feedbacks; it's not about biophysical systems at all. It's about what nations will do, what sort of treaties will be signed, what sort of policies will be implemented. In other words, it's a question about politics. Politics and power.

This is kind of obvious, but it often goes unremarked: Predictions about the impacts of climate change involve politics as much as physics. Scenarios devised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change don't just involve different estimations of climate sensitivity, they involve different projections of the spread of renewable energy and efficiency, the development of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), the rate of deforestation, and all sorts of other social, political, and technological trends.

No one disputes this, but I'm not sure we've really grappled with the implications. I shall enumerate three such implications for your reading pleasure:

1. Climate scientists and modelers don't necessarily have any special insight into how bad climate change will be! They are authorities on the physical side of things, but they don't have any better idea of how politics will unfold than anyone else.

2. There is indeed a great deal of uncertainty in climate predictions, but most of the uncertainty comes not from the hard science side but from the social science side. Physical models actually perform well, or at least their parameters and probabilities are fairly well understood. Expert predictions about social and political matters, however, are notoriously awful -- as in, very close to worthless. See: the work of Philip Tetlock; Dan Gardner's recent book; pre-2008-crash economic punditry.

How fast renewable energy and the rest will spread depends on the policies adopted by the world's big emitters. And that depends on politics and power. How will politics and power evolve? Anyone who presumes to know the answer to that question 50 years out -- hell, 10 years out -- is smoking biomass.

Of course, this kind of uncertainty is why climate modelers don't presume to "predict" at all and get irritated when model scenarios are taken as predictions. They offer a range of scenarios based on a range of possible inputs. Temperature declines this much when greenhouse-gas concentrations fall this much; this amount of renewable energy, efficiency, nuclear, and CCS yields this decline in emissions; that sort of thing. Still, as Foley's comments illustrate, they do consider some scenarios more likely than others, which means they are, at least implicitly, making judgments about the likely course of politics.

3. Foley and others in the "reasonable middle" say that climate impacts won't be as bad as "alarmists" claim. Those assurances rest on an assumption: that the world will take action. We will build new energy systems, transform agriculture, bury a bunch of CO2, and slow tropical deforestation. We will reduce emissions and thus avoid the truly nightmarish 6 degrees C-type scenarios. Catastrophe won't arrive because we won't be dumb enough to let it.

Climate scientists, in my experience, are reasonable people, left-brained types, and they have trouble believing that humanity would accelerate into foreseeable disaster. They see the problem and what needs to be done. It makes sense to them. So they believe that others will see it too, in time. It's so obvious!

But what if countries do not act in concert to reduce emissions? What if the policies that end up getting passed are fragmented, expensive, and ineffective? What if countries react to shocks (droughts, floods, famine) and resource shortages not with commitment to climate mitigation but with nationalism, xenophobia, and militarization?

There is no sign in today's geopolitical landscape of anything like the ambition necessary to pull off serious climate mitigation. There are efforts all over the place, but they are desultory relative to the precipitous decline in emissions necessary to limit temperature to 2 degrees C. At this point, in fact, 2 degrees C is probably out of reach. Hitting 3 or 4 degrees C would be a huge challenge (and the science of impacts at 4 degrees C is not pretty). The available evidence -- as opposed to hopes and predictions -- seems to indicate that we won't avert catastrophe. As Elizabeth Kolbert put it so memorably in Field Notes from a Catastrophe, "It may seem impossible to imagine that technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing."

When Foley says, "it won't be so bad as the alarmists say," he is implicitly committing his audience and their descendants to massive, coordinated action. Is that what they hear? Or do they only hear, "it won't be so bad ..."?

I had a Twitter conversation yesterday with Jonathan Foley (@GlobalEcoGuy), a climate scientist who directs the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, that I'd like to follow up on. These aren't exactly the most focused thoughts I've ever had, so bear with me for a bit of a ramble.

I don't know how to resurrect Twitter threads, but Foley, who's a good sport, allowed me to pester him about, among other things, what it means to be in the "reasonable middle" on climate change. (He sent me a-pestering with this innocent tweet, which links to his short essay on "becoming a climate pragmatist," containing good common sense with which I largely agree.) The dispute, as ever, is over "alarmism." Here's how Foley describes his message on climate:

I don't say "it won't be that bad" -- I say that "it won't be as bad / good as climate hawks / skeptics say".

This is a very common way of putting things in the climate-o-sphere: "Some people underplay the problem; some people overplay the problem; I play it down the center, just the straight facts. I am not on a side. I am in the reasonable middle."

I'd note two things about this message.

Photo by the Rainforest Action Network.

As I wrote in my last post -- and have been writing for years -- coal is on the decline in the U.S. The biggest driver of this trend is the current low cost of natural gas from fracking, but it also has to do with increasing competition from renewables, the aging of the U.S. coal fleet, organized grassroots opposition, new EPA regulations, and slowing demand for electricity [PDF].

The rapid move away from coal is hitting U.S. coal-mining companies where it hurts. The Wall Street Journal reports on the fortunes of Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources, the second- and third-largest coal-mining firms in the U.S.:

On a 52-week basis, shares of both Arch and Alpha are down 72%. ...

Arch is expected to see its profit fall by 44%, to $33 million. Alpha—still struggling to digest Massey Energy Inc. after spending $7.1 billion to acquire the competitor last year—is seen swinging to a first-quarter loss of $18 million, down from a year-ago profit of $49 million.

Every week brings a new story about coal's decline in America. Here are two from last week.

One is about American Electric Power, the nation's largest electric utility, based in Ohio but ranging over 11 states in the South and Midwest. AEP is the farthest thing from a good actor in the utility sector. Between 2008 and 2010, the company raised executive compensation by 30 percent, laid off 2,600 workers, spent almost $29 million lobbying the federal government, and paid a tax rate of -9 percent [PDF]. Yes, negative nine. It's that kind of company.

So it's significant that last week, AEP reaffirmed its intention to accelerate a shift away from coal. By 2020, according to CEO Nicholas Akins, coal will fall from 67 percent of AEP's assets to 50 percent.

I have been seriously slacking on the Friday Music Blogging lately! I plead excess travel. And apologize to the ones and ones of FMB fans out there. Anyway, back to it.

As I've said before, fans of beardy music are in hog heaven these days. There is a full-fledged beardy renaissance happening. I'm not sure exactly what started it -- I guess you could trace it back to Band of Horses and Fleet Foxes, at least in its recent incarnation -- but it is now in full flower. The Avett Brothers, The Head and the Heart, Family of the Year, Of Monsters and Men, Milo Greene ... all these bands have recently released albums or will release something this year. All follow the basic beardy template: strummy, stompy, catchy, sing-along music featuring pretty, multi-part, guy-girl harmonies.

I can't get enough of it! This is one of those genres where I don't really require excellence. Just the basic template is usually enough to please me. (Everyone has genres like this, right?) As a bonus, the bands in this genre seem relaxed and down to earth, more concerned with honesty and communal experience than pop success. I'm into that as well.

Anyway, this brings us to The Lumineers, a Denver-based band who released their eponymous debut album this month. Though the band itself appears puzzlingly beard-free, the music is beardy to the core, what they describe as "an amalgam of  heart-swelling stomp-and-clap acoustic rock, classic pop, and front-porch folk." And yes, there's a fetching young lady playing cello and mandolin and singing harmonies. Check!

The music is not exactly revelatory. Your mind will not be blown. It's just pleasant and hummable. This song, "Classy Girls," should give you a pretty good sense of what to expect:

Photo by Hans Gerwitz.

The International Energy Agency recently issued its annual progress report [PDF] on clean energy. Here's the five-cent version:

The transition to a low-carbon energy sector is affordable and represents tremendous business opportunities, but investor confidence remains low due to policy frameworks that do not provide certainty and address key barriers to technology deployment. Private sector financing will only reach the levels required if governments create and maintain supportive business environments for low-carbon energy technologies. [my emphasis]

Progress is inadequate -- relative to the goal of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees C -- on virtually every low-carbon technology except onshore wind and solar (click for a larger version of this chart):

Oh, wait, not this kind of wedge?

In his much remarked-upon interview with Rolling Stone, President Obama said some (in my view fairly tepid and passive) things about climate change. What interested me more is the very first bit:

Let's talk about the campaign. Given all we've heard about and learned during the GOP primaries, what's your take on the state of the Republican Party, and what do you think they stand for?

First of all, I think it's important to distinguish between Republican politicians and people around the country who consider themselves Republicans. I don't think there's been a huge change in the country. ...

But what's happened, I think, in the Republican caucus in Congress, and what clearly happened with respect to Republican candidates, was a shift to an agenda that is far out of the mainstream – and, in fact, is contrary to a lot of Republican precepts. I said recently that Ronald Reagan couldn't get through a Republican primary today, and I genuinely think that's true. ... You've got a Republican Congress whose centerpiece, when it comes to economic development, is getting rid of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Doesn't all of that kind of talk and behavior during the primaries define the party and what they stand for?

I think it's fair to say that this has become the way that the Republican political class and activists define themselves.

Obama's contention is that the GOP political class and activist base have worked themselves into a blind ideological fury, but most people who identify as Republican do not share their rigidity. They are more likely to lean in the direction of Independents and moderates.

If this is true, it identifies a political vulnerability. Democrats ought to be able to exploit the differences between the masses and the ideologues, to set them at odds with one another.

I'm not sure how many genuine "wedge issues" there are, actually, but one that shows up in the polls over and over again is clean energy. As I wrote back in January, clean energy is a wedge issue that favors Democrats.

James Lovelock. (Photo by Jonathan Cobb.)

James Lovelock became famous in the science community -- and in popular culture -- for the Gaia hypothesis, which postulated that Earth's physical and biological systems interact to form a single, coherent, self-regulating organism. It was an idea that met with intense skepticism but went on to gain some acceptance, spark new lines of inquiry, and secure Lovelock a place in science history.

That was in the 1970s. Since then, he's mainly written books about it. Early this century, he apparently got tired of being out of the public eye. In 2004, he made a big fuss scolding enviros that they would have to accept nuclear power. In 2006, he warned that "billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable." In 2008, he said "democracy must be put on hold" in order to respond to climate change. In 2009, he reiterated that "the climate war could kill nearly all of us and leave the few survivors living a Stone Age existence."

It seems apocalypse porn was no longer getting headlines, so Lovelock's latest provocation is that, woops, he went too far, he was an alarmist, and what's more, Al Gore's an alarmist too! The climate crankosphere is all a-flutter about this. "Warmist recants," etc. etc.

I guess I'm not clear why we're supposed to follow along with rapt attention as James Lovelock gets his knickers in and out of a twist. If we are concerned with the latest results from climate science, we're in luck: scientists frequently report on them! They publish in scientific journals, organize reviews, and write popular articles. Back in 2009, around the time of the Copenhagen talks, a group of 26 climatologists released the "Copenhagen Diagnosis," which reviewed hundreds of scientific papers released since the 2005 cut-off date for the 2007 IPCC report. The World Resources Institute has round-up of the latest climate science. Joe Romm also pulled together dozens of studies in 2010.

All the recent science points in roughly the same direction: Climate change is hitting harder and faster than expected. Ice is melting and sea levels are rising faster than projections. We are currently on a trajectory for what were previously considered worst-case scenarios. MIT, the Met Office's Hadley Center, and the International Energy Agency all warn of warming this century of 5 degrees C or greater; we know that higher than 4 degrees C is almost certain to be catastrophic. Maybe not "billions of people die and survivors rut like animals at the poles" catastrophic, but catastrophic enough to make further delay insane and immoral.

James Lovelock made a great show of going overboard. Now he's made a great show of backpedaling. Both have generated a great deal of media coverage at the expense of obscuring the facts and discrediting serious climate science. Can we change the channel now?

Here's a fascinating anthropological case study on how climate change plays out in the heartland. It seems there was a spirited debate on the issue in the Iowa legislature recently. More or less everyone involved got things wrong, which ... welcome to my life. But the way the debate unfolded is quite revealing.

It begins when Democratic Sen. Rob Hogg (that name can't hurt in Iowa politics) reads a statement from a coalition of Iowa religious leaders:

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges facing our world today and as religious leaders representing diverse faith traditions we are called to reaffirm our commitment to be responsible stewards of Earth's resources and to act in love to our neighbors both locally and globally. Scientists, including those representing 28 Iowa colleges and universities who recently released a statement, have warned us that changes in global climate patterns are brining more extreme weather events to Iowa, the United States and our world.

So far so good.

Enter Republican Sen. David Johnson:

With all due respect to our religious leaders ... how much are you willing to spend to reverse what you call global warming? The country of Spain made a huge transition to their economy for green energy. What was the result of that? Bankruptcy?

This is a reference to one of those denier perennials, the Spanish jobs study. Conservatives wield it like a talisman. It was an atrocious study and has been debunked many times, but of course that's made almost no difference. Suffice to say, Spain has economic troubles, but they are entirely unrelated to its renewable energy subsidies, which amount to a tiny sliver of its GDP.

(Side note: For a brief period earlier this month, wind turbines covered 60 percent of Spain's power demand.)

Hogg then grew agitated:

How much better off would this country be if there hadn't been a $6 billion drought last year in Texas? How much better off would our state be if we hadn't suffered $20 billion in flood damage over the last 20 years? You want to ruin our economy, Senator Johnson, you stick your head in the sand and ignore this issue.

I like your spirit, Mr. Hogg, but ... no. The time lag between cause and climate effect is much larger than that. Any action that might plausibly have affected the Texas drought or Iowa floods took place many, many decades ago. And there is nothing Iowa can do in terms of climate pollution -- nothing humanity can do -- to prevent next year's droughts and floods. Actions taken today to reduce climate pollution will have effects on global temperatures, if at all, many, many decades in the future.

This is part of why climate is known as a "super-wicked problem." Many people benefit from burning fossil fuels today. Those who benefit from not burning fossil fuels (at least in terms of climate) live in the latter half of the century.

Johnson responded just as heatedly:

I'm on the side of the scientists. I served with in Antarctica and Greenland and I'm the only member of this body that has done that. And there is no agreement in the scientific community, no consensus that things have really changed because change happens.

"Things have changed because change happens" is, um, unfalsifiable. Nay, meaningless. I think what what he's trying to say, however, is that there's "no agreement in the scientific community" on climate change. This is, of course, flatly false. A 2010 survey published by the National Academy of Sciences found that 97-98 percent of working climate scientists agree on the basics of anthropogenic climate change.

Hogg and Johnson are both a little confused, though obviously Hogg much less -- and much less detrimentally -- so. But neither perspective is the one that does most damage to the prospects of progress.

No, the most dangerous perspective is expressed at the end of the rambling and fruitless hour-long debate, by Republican Sen. Randy Feenstra:

Honestly, on that subject I think we should just agree to disagree because it's not going to get us anywhere.

This is the climate conversation in miniature. The problem is raised. Conservatives forecast economic doom. The economics show that we can do a great deal at comparatively moderate cost (certainly moderate relative to the cost of climate change impacts), but it's very difficult to overcome fear with promises. So advocates make dramatic, often exaggerated claims about proximate impacts. Deniers dismiss the science altogether. And then people who aren't committed to one "side" or another get sick of it and want to move on -- to "agree to disagree."

This is why conservative deniers have a built-in advantage on climate. They don't have to win the argument. They just have to keep arguing until everyone gets sick of it.